Top Tips for Display Advertising

John M

Display Advertising – 5 Quick Tips

Display ads are the advertisements that appear on websites alongside the usual page content. Display ads include video, audio, animation, images, text or combinations of all of the above.

Display adverts attract the attention of prospective customers in a different way to straight PPC advertising. PPC (text based) adverts generally show on search engine results pages rather than on third party websites. Display ads use a clever combination of images, animation and text to get the users attention. Display ads are placed on websites with relevant information on them – rather than being randomly placed all over the web. Display campaigns set up correctly should only display ads to visitors that make up your target audience and who are already reading relevant content related to what you are promoting.

Display advertising can be more cost effective – often costing less per click than the highly competitive pure PPC channel. The price for display advertising is either on a per impression basis or on a per click basis. Display has an additional benefit in that even if no one engages with (clicks) your advert – you are still getting good exposure for your brand. This is even more valuable if you are only paying per click!

Below are some tips on how to get the most from display advertising. As it is hard to find your own display adverts on the open web it is important you give your agency clear instructions as to what display advertising options you want to try. The tips here are fairly basic to start with but I will follow up this post with more advanced tips in future.

Few/One Keywords Per Ad Group – Quite often when setting up a display campaign people will simply duplicate the search campaign and change the targeting. However, Google can tend to ignore ad groups with a lot of keywords in for display campaigns. I have recently set up a test where I took the top 100 keywords from the search campaign and added them 1 per ad group to a new display campaign. The initial results look very promising; lower CPA, higher conversion rate better CTR.

Remarketing – This is a great way of dipping your toe into the display network. It is basically targeting people who have already been to your site, you can choose to exclude people who have converted or not, it depends on what you are selling. What it allows you to do is target people who already have an interest in your site (not just people who Google matches to your keywords). This minimises the risk to yourself much more easily, then, if it works you can begin to roll out generic display campaigns.

Text & image ads – Use a combination of both to ensure that you can be placed in all ad positions across the network. Some people shy away from text ads for display advertising but I have had some amazing results with them. Other best practises are to ensure that your image ads contain good calls to action (same as text ads on the search network), clear messages and ensure that they are easy to understand.

Refresh Your Ads – Refresh your image ads often, especially on really high volume campaigns. This will allow you to engage new users much more effectively. Text ads should be refreshed as well, but not as regularly as they are often not as visible as image ads.

Bid Low, Don’t Worry About Position – People get hung up on average position on the search network, this is a big no-no in any case, but it is even more of a faux pas to get too obsessed with it on the display network. The great thing about image ads is that they are eye-catching where ever they are on the page, so just bid where you can afford to be seen…